ABSTRACT
This chapter finds that news-story-level factors—particularly news topics, news sources, and geographic foci—are related to specific journalistic role performances. Controlling for variations due to organizational and country differences, we found that state-related topics such as government issues, political campaigns, and police and court stories positively influence the performance of the watchdog role. We further determined that economy, transportation, and health topics positively influence the performance of the service role. The use of civil society and individual citizens as sources also showed a significant impact on the performance of the civic role. Based on these findings, we argue that it is important to continue to theorize and examine the link between news-story-level factors and journalistic role performance as the field refines its explanation of the latter in different contexts and settings.
